The story follows an unnamed man who returns to his hometown for a funeral and gets caught up in events that began forty years earlier. The man remembers some very strange happenings from his youth that are very fairy-tale-esque!

When eleven year old aspiring scientist Flavia de Luce finds a dead bird with a stamp bizarrely pinned to its beak, she gets involved in a mystery that will require all of her cunning and resourcefulness to unravel. This is an old-fashioned mystery written for adults, and the reader of this audiobook is fantastic!